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What Makes People Rethink Their Beliefs—and How Can You Guide That Process?
A clear, practical breakdown of the three steps from How Minds Change by David McRaney—building rapport, exploring confidence levels, and evoking personal stories—to help you understand how real attitude shifts happen. Ideal for readers who want evidence‑based communication strategies that foster openness and meaningful dialogue.
Continue reading to learn how these three steps can help you create conversations that lower defenses, spark reflection, and open the door to genuine change.
McRaney traveled the world to find people who change minds for a living—like those going door-to-door talking about marriage equality in California or transgender rights in Florida—and saw firsthand what a profound impact a 10-minute conversation can have.
After analyzing the most effective mind-changing techniques in the book, I discovered three essential steps we must take to change someone’s mind (three checkpoints you must get through to unlock change):
Mind-Changing Step #1: Build Rapport
Building rapport is like geƫng someone to turn off their security system and invite you into their house. The house is their emotional space—where beliefs live. Build rapport by remembering the first four letters: R.A.P.P.
- R: Relax. Drop your need to change their mind, and just aim to understand why you see things differently. Treat it like a conversation with an old friend.
- A: Accept. You don’t have to agree with their belief, but you can’t shame them for holding it. If you had their experiences, you’d likely believe what they believe. So have some compassion and park the judgment.
- P: Paraphrase in the best possible way. After you ask a question, pay close attention so you can summarize their response in a way they’ll actually like. For example: “What I’m hearing is that you believe that Universal Basic Income would serve as an economic stabilizer and provide a foundational safety net for a new wave of entrepreneurship.” Think of this as a “goodwill paraphrase.” It proves you listened and it makes them look good, which encourages them to open up further.
- P: Point out common ground. We are tribal creatures who remain guarded around people unlike us. So be quick to point out what you both want, fear, or care about. Shared values build trust—and trust opens the door to change.
Mind-Changing Step #2: Discuss Their Confidence Score
Ask someone how well they can explain how a zipper works, and they’ll sound confident because they use one every day. But the moment they try to describe it in detail, they stumble, and their confidence collapses. Psychologists call this the “illusion of explanatory depth”: we assume we understand something far better than we actually do. This cognitive quirk applies not only to everyday objects but to deeply held beliefs.
For example, if someone is certain that immigration hurts the economy or that vaccines are dangerous, ask them to explain how they became so sure. They’ll struggle to provide a compelling answer. As they struggle, their overconfidence and certainty start to crack.
Professional mind-changers create these cracks by asking three sequential questions:
- Can you rate your confidence in that belief on a scale from 0 to 100?
- How did you arrive at that number?
- Why isn’t your number higher?
When someone confidently says, “My confidence score is 90,” they immediately realize they need rock-solid reasoning to back it up. Then, when you ask them to explain that number, they struggle to provide 90%-level reasoning, and a sliver of self-doubt sets in. You expand that self-doubt when you ask a version of ‘Why isn’t your number higher?’—for example, ‘What accounts for those missing ten points?’ or ‘Why isn’t it 100?’ This forces them to describe their uncertainty in detail, and they often realize their uncertainty is more significant than they thought.
Mind-Changing Step #3: Evoke a Personal Story
Nearly everyone has experiences that contradict their beliefs that they’ve simply dismissed. Ask someone with strong anti-immigrant views to reflect on their experience with immigrants at work. They may suddenly realize they spent years working alongside an immigrant coworker whom they deeply respected.
In many cases, personal experiences are the only things that can overturn years of cherry-picked information and reinforcement, because it’s hard to ignore lived reality. That’s why a professional mind-changer McRaney profiles in the book likes to imagine walking into a conversation with a ring of keys. Each key is a story-evoking question designed to unlock one of the many past experiences they’ve overlooked to maintain their certainty. Try questions like:
- “Have you met someone from the other side who made you think, ‘Okay, they’re actually pretty reasonable’?”
- “Has anything ever happened that made you question this belief—even for a moment?”
As they share a personal story, they get to relive an experience and reconsider their previous conclusions. Your job is to highlight and echo back key moments that challenge their existing belief. If you do this right, you’ll evoke a vivid personal experience that contradicts a toxic belief, which can fundamentally change their mind and alter the course of their life.